For all the shouting that has dominated these town hall meetings on health care lately, they have yielded a few important insights. The first is that the town hall itself has probably reached the end of its usefulness in the Internet age; if you’re looking for thoughtful dialogue, you might as well hold your next meeting on the stern of a Somali pirate ship. The second is that we now have a visual sense of the kind of voter who is militantly opposed to Obama’s health care agenda and, more broadly, to the president himself.

The typical anti-Obama activist tends to be white, male and — perhaps most significant — advanced in age. A poll conducted earlier this month by CNN and Opinion Research showed a rather stark age divide when it came to health care: 57 percent of voters under 50 said they favored the outlines of a Democratic plan, but that number was a full 20 points lower among voters over 65. In three Pew Research Center polls going back to April, senior citizens consistently gave Obama’s job performance lower approval ratings than did than any other age group.

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Source: The New York Times/CBS News, July 2009

Ideologically speaking, this is not what we are accustomed to seeing. Successful Democratic candidates have long relied on oldsters who grew up worshiping Franklin Roosevelt and who cherished their Medicare and Social Security; one of the best-worn Democratic clichés over the years has been the cry that Republicans were plotting to strip seniors of their pills and pensions. If that advantage is eroding now, then it certainly has something to do with the specifics of the health care argument. Suddenly it’s the Democrats in Washington who are talking about rejiggering Medicare to rein in costs, and now Republicans are the ones expertly exploiting fear among the elderly.

And yet Obama’s problems with the aged didn’t start last month. He struggled to connect with seniors in last year’s Democratic primaries, and though a Pew poll conducted several months before the general election gave Democrats a 12-point partisan advantage among seniors, Obama himself never really won them over. He performed about 8 points lower among the oldest voters than he did among the electorate as a whole; by contrast, the last successful Democrat, Bill Clinton, twice ran the same or better among seniors as he did overall.

Most of the conjecture about this phenomenon during the campaign centered on race, the theory being that a lot of voters born into segregated America simply had a harder time embracing the idea of a black president. No doubt there’s some truth to this. (Perhaps that’s the audience Glenn Beck of Fox News had in mind when he posited recently that Obama loathed all white people, which would have come as a surprise to the president’s white grandparents.) But it’s also impossible to extricate race from your standard generational resistance — to know, in other words, whether some seniors opposed Obama because he was black or because he seemed to embody, with his fist bumps and his failure to cover his heart during the national anthem, the further decline of some Rockwellian cultural ideal. Every young presidential aspirant whose candidacy, like Obama’s, seems largely rooted in generational unrest — John Kennedy in 1960, Gary Hart in 1984 — irritates traditionalists, regardless of ideology or ethnicity. It must be hard for older voters not to experience such transitional campaigns, with their implicit indictments of the past, as a rhetorical hand on the back, pushing them not so gently toward the inevitable exit.

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Credit
Bob London

More to the point, though, it’s probably time for us to update our notions of elderly Americans and how their worldviews were formed. We are inclined to imagine our oldest citizens as products of the New Deal, voters whose earliest memories engendered a lasting faith in the goodness of government. But conservative theorists like Karl Rove used to say that time was on the side of Republicans where the elderly were concerned, because Depression-era memories would someday give way to a more complicated historical legacy — and perhaps, in this narrow respect, their grand predictions had some validity. If Obama has little of Bill Clinton’s appeal to old folks, it’s probably because old folks now aren’t the same ones who rode volunteer-driven vans to the polls in 1992.

After all, a 70-year-old American today, born in 1939, probably has no personal memory of F.D.R., but he would have lived through the pain of disappearing manufacturing jobs and family farms, and the rapid deterioration of urban neighborhoods and schools, conditions unabated by government experiments in welfare and public housing. Wooed by Ronald Reagan during their prime earning years, these voters may not be nearly as sympathetic to Obama’s vision of activist government as Democrats might have assumed. For these new senior citizens, even the Social Security and Medicare on which they often rely may be viewed less as instruments of beneficent government than as a partial repayment for decades of taxes.

The good news for Obama and his party, of course, is that they still enjoy an enviable level of support among voters just breaking into the work force and among those now drifting into middle age. And that means that if reigning Democrats can manage to get health care policy right this time, and maybe even add some fundamental energy reforms, they might still be able to cement more hopeful attitudes about government for generations to come, much as Roosevelt did in his day. Today’s younger voters might never be as party-affiliated as their grandparents were, but neither may they turn out to be as cynical about their leaders as their parents often seem to be. If the president has his way (which is to say, if the worst nightmares of Republicans come to pass), those voters may someday live out their retirements in Arizona or Nevada, spinning stories for their grandchildren of the days when Barack Obama was twice elected president, when government managed once again to make things better instead of worse and when politicians still bothered with these things called town halls.

Matt Bai writes on national politics for the magazine.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page MM11 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: The New Old Guard. Today's Paper|Subscribe